Autorité et auteurités émergentes dans un environnement organisationnel non-hiérarchisé en ligne : le cas de la construction de règles sur Wikipédia
Year: 2015
Type: dissertation
Abstract: Authority and emerging authorships in an online non-hierarchical organizational environment : the case of rules building on Wikipedia Who is in authority in one organization where nobody has a fixed hierarchical status? This research answers the question through the analysis of three processes of rule building on the French Wikipedia, since its creation in 2001 and for a period of ten years. In a Weberian perspective, authority is seen as a domination relationship of one actor on the others. However, more and more organizations design organizational structures that allows equal participation of actors to decision-making processes. World Wide Web and, more specifically, Web 2.0 technologies as Wikis generated suitable environments for such initiatives whose the encyclopedic project Wikipedia has become one of the most popular examples. Indeed, there are no hierarchical status on Wikipedia but negotiation among wikipedians is supposed to lead to consensual solutions. Nevertheless, authority phenomena do emerge within conversations and peculiar wikipedians gain more authority. Results show that the surplus of authority that some wikipedians acquire comes from actions of inscriptions : propositions to discuss, opinions, synthesis of previous talks, modification of propositions to be submitted to vote, etc. When a singular or a multiple actor gathers many inscriptions, s/he becomes authoritative. Made communicatively, these actions reflect an "authoring" of the organization. Hence, the theoretical notion of “organizational authorship” illustrates how action precedes and builds legitimacy more than the status would guarantee the right to act. Thus authority is seen as an emerging modality, relative and built locally in the interactions. This research then completes and makes more complex previous works on authority in the field of communication as constituting organizations (CCO approaches). The methodology draws upon conversational analysis of asynchronous online negotiations. What Wikipedians are doing while negotiating as well as actions they detail within their negotiations have been categorized. The results were interpreted and compared with narratives of the biggest contributors to the analyzed rules to ensure a diachronic understanding. The entire analysis was made possible through an ethnographic approach and a participant observation in the long term (continuous observation period from 2010 to 2014) providing the missing contextual elements and allowing to confront contradictory explanations. The main contributions of the thesis are: 1) The conceptualization of organizational authorship to describe the authority of an actor in an organization regardless of the hierarchical status; 2) A rich and detailed interpretation of the emerging process leading to the construction of the authority on the French Wikipedia; 3) An illustration of conversational analysis applied to asynchronous online speeches.
Source: HAL
Author: Emmanuel Wathelet
Institution: UCLouvain
Language: French
Subfield: Communication
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2595060868